ures, the usual pleasures of
society? Certainly not the cynical one--"Life would be tolerable if it
were not for its pleasures." Pleasures do make up, and ought to make
up, a considerable portion of life. Now I have no time for an essay on
pleasures. I will only offer two remarks. One is that the pleasure open
to all cultivated women, even in the pleasures that please them least,
is the pleasure of giving pleasure. Go to give pleasure, not to get it,
and that converts anything into a pleasure. The other remark is, Pitch
your ordinary level of life on so quiet a note that simple things shall
not fail to please. If home, and children, and games, and the daily
routine of life--if the sight of October woods and the Severn sea, and
of human happy faces fail to please, then either in fact or in
imagination you are drugging yourself with some strong drink of
excitement, and spoiling the natural healthy appetite for simple
pleasures. This is one of the dangers of educated women: but it is their
danger because they are imperfectly educated: educated on one side, that
of books; and not on the other and greater side, of wide human
sympathies. Society seems to burden and narrow and dull the uneducated
woman, but it also hardens and dulls a certain sort of educated woman
too, one who refuses her sympathies to the pleasures of life. But to the
fuller nature, society brings width and fresh clearness. It gives the
larger heart and the readier sympathy, and the wider the sphere the more
does such a nature expand to fill it.

What I am now saying amounts to this, that an educated intelligence is
good, but an educated sympathy is better. I recall certain lines written
by the late Lord Carlisle on being told that a lady was plain and
commonplace:--

"You say that my love is plain,
But that I can never allow,
When I look at the thought for others
That is written on her brow.

"The eyes are not fine, I own,
She has not a well-cut nose,
But a smile for others' pleasure
And a sigh for others' woes.

"Quick to perceive a want,
Quicker to set it right,
Quickest in overlooking
Injury, wrong, or slight.

"Hark to her words to the sick,
Look at her patient ways,
Every word she utters
Speaks to the speaker's praise.

"Purity, truth, and love,
Are they such common things?